In 1957, the
Lycée Français built a three-story, white-brick annex on the Livingston lot,
at 5 East 95th Street, and earlier this year it was demolished for a new
building that will be joined to the old Carhart house at 3 East 95th Street.
Both will be as sold as condominiums by 95 LLC, a Hong Kong developer.

Renderings of the new project, designed by the architects Zivkovic
Associates and John Simpson & Partners, appear to show an unusual hybrid.
The bulk of the new building is in a restrained French neo-Classical design,
but a setback rooftop addition has a temple front, and the side elevation
facing the House of the Redeemer has a Regency-style character, perhaps
after the style of the 18th-century Scottish architect Robert Adam. The
facade, of Indiana limestone, required approval by the Landmarks
Preservation Commission.

THE new building mimics the character of a large town house, but instead
of responding to the Fabbri courtyard with one of its own, as envisioned by
the 1914 restriction, the new portion of the condominium is being built out
to the building line — like the white brick Lycée Français — right up
against the old Fabbri property.

Sharon Baum, a broker with the Corcoran
Group, stepped out of her chauffeured Rolls-Royce in front of 9 East
72nd Street on the afternoon of Feb. 5., a rhinestone pin that read
"SOLD" sparkling on her lapel. Ms. Baum headed inside the Beaux Arts
mansion, one of six Upper East Side townhouses, spread out over three
locations, that comprise the Lycee Francais de New York, a bilingual
school started in 1935. Just three days earlier, the Lycee had hired Ms.
Baum and her colleagues at Corcoran to sell the buildings, thereby
replacing Massey Knackal Realty, the firm that has been marketing the
properties since last August.

Ms. Baum's first step was to begin
referring to the string of buildings as "The Lycee Collection": They
include Nos. 7 and 9 East 72nd Street, priced at $21 million and $30
million, respectively; 3 and 5 East 95th Street, priced at $19.5 million
and $10.3 million, respectively; 60 East 93rd Street, priced at $17
million; and, finally, 12 East 73rd Street, priced at $8 million.

Her second step will be to slash the prices
almost 20 percent on Feb. 8.

The school has also hired a spokesman,
Howard Rubenstein, who said that the change in representation reflected
a lesson learned over the past six months. He said the school had
switched from Massey Knackal, a primarily commercial real estate firm,
to Corcoran, a primarily residential firm, because most of the interest
in the properties has been from people who wanted to return the
buildings to individual homes. The Lycee has had "an enormous number of
people coming to look at the buildings and inquire," said Mr.
Rubenstein. "Seventy percent of those people want the buildings for
residential use."

Mr. Rubenstein also said that the Lycee
thought Corcoran could better reach possible overseas buyers. Ms. Baum
said that she and Carrie Chang, another Corcoran broker, are marketing
the properties around the world to individuals, institutions and
developers who could turn the mansions into apartments.

Mr. Rubenstein said the Lycee has turned
down some offers, but it now seems as though the buyers are the ones who
are balking, turning down the school's high prices. "My sense is that
Lycee is getting anxious," said one townhouse expert about the school's
having switched real estate firms. "I had heard that they had a $43
million offer for the two buildings on 72nd Street. They should have run
screaming to the bank." The broker said the rejected offer was made by a
foreigner who wanted to turn the townhouses into a foundation.

In November, New York magazine reported
that Band-Aid heiress Libbet Johnson was close to a deal to buy the six
mansions. The report said she planned to live at 9 East 72nd Street
(known as the Sloan Mansion) and sell off the other buildings. "That was
just a rumor," said Ms. Baum. But two of the properties have offers on
the table now, one made by an individual and one by an institution, she
said.

The de-institutionalizing of the mansions
of New York-especially those on the Upper East Side-has been going on
for the last couple of years, and is gaining as the de rigueur move in
real estate. The buildings are being renovated back into individual
residences. One of the first significant purchases was that of New York
investor Bruce Kovner, who paid $17.5 million in November 1999 for the
uptown outpost of the International Center for Photography, on the
corner of Fifth Avenue and 94th Street. (The museum has still not
vacated the building.) A year later, socialite Sloan Lindeman spent
$11.25 million on the English Speaking Union, a 33-foot-wide mansion at
16 East 69th Street that had been the union's headquarters for 44 years.
And on Dec. 6, a 40-foot-wide house at 10-12 East 94th Street that
housed the offices of Louise Wise Services, an adoption agency, was
purchased by Nicholas Rohatyn, son of the former ambassador to France,
for $7.4 million.

Comparatively, the Lycee properties are
treasures, but aside from being overpriced, they will be extremely
difficult to un-renovate. A typical floor plan includes a biology lab, a
nurse's office and a dining room. Then again, the grand staircases have
been retained, and there are spaces with designations like "Salle
d'Honneur" and "The Marble Room." The school, which currently enrolls
970 kids from preschool to the 12th grade, started at the two buildings
at 3 and 5 East 95th Street. The five-story house at 3 East 95th Street
was built in 1921 in the 18th-century French style and was purchased by
the Lycee in 1937. The three-story building at 5 East 95th Street was
constructed the same year, after the school bought a garden from a
neighbor. Ms. Baum showed the latter property on Feb. 2.

In 1964, the Lycee bought the two buildings
at 7 and 9 East 72nd Street, which now house the
preschool-through-elementary-school facilities. Built in 1896 for Henry
T. Sloan, a carpet upholsterer, 9 East 72nd Street is the prize among
the properties: It's 59 feet wide, has five stories and boasts
approximately 25,363 square feet. The neighboring five-story house at 7
East 72nd Street, which was built in 1899 for Oliver Gould Jennings,
director of the National Fuel Gas Company, is 28 feet wide, with a
limestone facade, large French windows and a total of 18,256 square
feet.

As Ms. Baum walked through the mansions,
which have been joined, she pointed out marble fireplaces and ornate
original moldings. The Sloan Mansion is the largest townhouse to go on
the market since the Vanderbilt Fabbri Mansion at 11 East 62nd Street,
which Ms. Baum sold to the Japanese government for $21.5 million in
December 1998. That mansion had been the headquarters of the Johnson
O'Connor Research Foundation, an aptitude-testing center, for 55 years.
Michael Jackson was the only individual who seriously considered buying
it.

In 1978, the Lycee bought its fifth
building, formerly known as the Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt house,
at 60 East 93rd Street. They paid $680,000. Finally, in 1994, the school
bought 12 East 73rd Street, a five-story townhouse built in 1920, for
$4.3 million. It has been connected to the mansions on 72nd Street.

Richard Speciale, a financial adviser to
the Lycee, said the school's decision to vacate the townhouses was based
on a drive to improve the academic environment rather than to raise
cash. "They came to a truly emotional decision to leave the premises,"
said Mr. Speciale. "The single best way to re-invigorate the program at
Lycee was to find another site and build a facility designed for an
academic purpose." Mr. Speciale said a new facility was a more
cost-effective alternative to renovating the townhouses.

The Lycee bought a site on York Avenue
between 75th and 76th streets in January and is in the process of
building a new school, which it plans to open in the fall of 2002.
They're hoping Ms. Baum will help them sell their other properties well
before then.

Streetscapes/ East 93rd Street Between
Madison and Park Avenues; Where City's Stately Mansions Made a Last
Stand
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Published: September 29, 2002, Sunday

THE world changed forever -- after the stock market crash of 1929. And one
of the biggest changes was the end of the era of large mansions on the
Upper East Side, as even the richest families found irresistible the
convenience and economy of apartment living. But on 93rd Street between
Madison and Park Avenues, several families sought to make a last stand
of elegance. Now new owners are taking over two of the mansions.
This block of 93rd was nearly empty in 1888 when its oldest buildings went
up, the row houses at 57 and 61 East 93rd. Then in 1891 came the small
apartment buildings at 62 to 72 East 93rd. In 1900 the developer
Frederick Kilpatrick built the more expansive Alamo apartment building
at 55 East 93rd, which offered apartments of 5 to 12 rooms.

By this time the block had filled up with other modest buildings, hardly
the company that the mansions' builders, who were filtering up Fifth
Avenue, would like to keep. One big house did go up on the northwest
corner of 93rd and Park, built in 1917 by the financier Francis F.
Palmer and designed by Delano & Aldrich, but the nearly cubic
Georgian-style house related to the growing stature of Park Avenue, not
to 93rd Street.

Down in Murray Hill, the banker George F. Baker, head of National City
Bank and one of the richest men in the country, was fighting apartment
and loft developers who sought to build high-rises that would overshadow
his mansion at Madison near 39th. Baker, who oversaw a family complex
that included a house for his in-laws, the Loews, faced the unpleasant
prospect of buying up parcel after parcel as other householders fled to
Midtown and farther north.

He kept on, but the younger generation did not. In 1927, George F. Baker
Jr. left the Murray Hill enclave and bought the old Palmer mansion at
93rd and Park. The younger Baker brought back Delano & Aldrich to add a
ballroom to the main houseand to design a smaller house at 67 East 93rd
and a garage at 69 East 93rd, all in complementary style.

The son's uptown defection spread, and in 1930 his sister and
brother-in-law, Florence and William Goadby Loew, bought the properties
at 54 to 58 East 93rd, They retained Walker & Gillette to design a
sumptuous, Regency-style limestone house at 56 East 93rd, with a
distinctive, inward-curving facade. Building records indicate it was for
''the owner, his wife and 16 servants.''

In the same year, Virginia Vanderbilt, divorced in 1927 from William K.
Vanderbilt Jr., bought the buildings at 60 to 64 East 93rd Street. To
replace them, she had the architect John Russell Pope design a French
classic house of 51 rooms. It is likely that Mrs. Vanderbilt was more
than just casually friendly with the Bakers and the Loews. In 1920 she
gave a dinner at her Fifth Avenue mansion for the Loews' daughter,
Evelyn.

The ''new residential colony,'' as The New York Times put it in 1930, ran
counter to the decline of the large private house in New York, and that
year marked the last boom for such dwellings. Plans for five in all of
Manhattan were filed at the Department of Buildings that year, and the
few built after the Depression never again rivaled the precrash
versions.

A fourth big house was scheduled for the block in 1930. The old buildings
at 66 to 68 East 93rd were bought by the songwriter Irving Berlin, who
also had a connection to Mrs. Vanderbilt. His wife was the former Ellin
Mackay, and her grandfather, John W. Mackay, had been a partner in
Nevada silver operations with Mrs. Vanderbilt's father, James Fair.

Berlin intended also to build a house, but the deepening Depression ended
his plans. ''Money came up a lot the summer after the Crash,'' his
daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, recalled in her book, ''Irving Berlin: A
Daughter's Memoir'' (Knopf, 1994). The Berlins did not file plans for
the house, and Mrs. Barrett says she does not know if they even hired an
architect; they remained living in the Warwick Hotel on West 54th
Street.

The Loew and Vanderbilt houses were completed in 1931, the same year that
George F. Baker Sr. died in his Murray Hill house, and both Baker Jr.
and Mrs. Vanderbilt bought other adjacent properties to protect their
home sites. The aspirations of these millionaires brought others to the
block, like the architect William H. Russell, who remodeled the front of
65 East 93rd Street in the Art Deco style for his own occupancy. But the
golden age of mansions on East 93rd Street was brief; Virginia
Vanderbilt died in 1935, Florence Loew in 1936 and George F. Baker Jr.
in 1937.

Those with different ideas arrived, among them Jan Ruhtenberg, a
Latvian-born modernist architect who had studied with Mies van der Rohe.
Ruhtenberg stripped down the old brownstone at 57 East 93rd. In 1937 the
magazine Architectural Forum praised the removal of plaster from the
interior brick walls, which ''gained three inches of valuable space in
the entry and provided a richly textured surface in the studio which
shows off the severe furniture to great advantage.''

The smaller houses were cut up into apartments. In 1938 one tenant in
Russell's Art Deco house, which had been converted to apartments, was
Diana Vreeland. She had just begun her American fashion career at
Harper's Bazaar -- later she was to become editor in chief of Vogue. Her
purposely outrageous column, ''Why Don't You?,'' made provocative
fashion suggestions, including yellow collars ''for all your dogs'' and
a furry elkhide trunk for the back of your car.

THE biggest houses were harder to carve up. In 1955 the Loew family sold
its house to the impresario Billy Rose, still famous for his Aquacades
at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, and in 1958 the Bakers sold their
big corner house to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which
still owns it. Irving Berlin did not sell his house site until 1959. The
Vanderbilt house later became one of several buildings of the Lycée
Française de New York.

Edward F. Ulmann, a retired industrialist, owned Baker's smaller house in
the 1970's and 1980's, and recalled it with affection. ''Although I
hadn't been brought up in modest circumstances, it was a revelation to
me what a genius William Delano was as far as demanding comfort is
concerned,'' he said. ''Everything always fell to hand, the light
switches, the outlets, the door handles, they were always where you
wanted them.

''There was an entire floor for the servants, not way up in the roof but
inserted invisibly above the ground floor. The trunk room was
beautifully fitted out with cedar slats to keep your trunks off the
floor.

''In the dining room you never had the smell of food because the kitchen
was in the basement -- in fact it took me several years to discover we
even had a kitchen. There was a bank of freezers in the basement that
wouldn't have surprised the captain of the Q.E.II.''

Both Mr. Ulmann's house and the Baker garage are now owned by the investor
and house collector Richard H. Jenrette.

Now a huge barricade runs in front of the old Loew house for the Spence
School, which bought the building in 1999 and is altering it for school
use. Samuel White, the architect in charge of the work, said the Loews'
varied interiors -- from Jacobean to Art Deco -- are in storage and will
be reinstalled.

Next door in the old Vanderbilt mansion, the students of the Lycée
Française are still at work, but the school has sold the building to
Carlton Hobbs, a London antiques dealer. The school will occupy the
building until its new campus at 75th and York is finished. So the
latest chapter in the history of this block of New York's last mansions
will not be completed for a few more years.